For Help in America’s Longest War, Trump Tilts Political Balance Toward India Over Pakistan

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Men gathered around a vehicle hit by a drone strike last year in Pakistan. The location of the strike was a sign that the Obama administration had grown weary of Pakistan’s failure to move against the Taliban.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Three American presidents have spent nearly 16 years alternately cajoling, coaxing, threatening and bombing Pakistan, all with a goal of trying to change the Pakistani government’s decisions about the factions it supports in Afghanistan’s desperate civil war.

The latest of those, President Trump, tried a different approach during his speech on Monday night. After chastising Pakistan for harboring militants and terrorists, he called on India — Pakistan’s archrival — to flex its economic influence in Afghanistan to help stabilize the country.

It was an unsubtle warning that Mr. Trump would not hesitate to put a thumb on one side of the balance in South Asian power politics, publicly drawing the United States closer to India while casting Pakistan as a friendless pariah state. But there was broad skepticism on Tuesday — both in Washington and Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan — that the tactic would force Pakistan’s government to abandon its longtime strategy in Afghanistan.

Some even predicted that Mr. Trump’s approach would have the opposite effect, causing Pakistani military and intelligence leaders to recommit to the groups they have long supported in the Afghan conflict. Some said it would further cement links between Pakistan and China, which sees India as a rival in Asia.

“Afghanistan continues to be a proxy war between New Delhi and Islamabad, and both sides see it as a zero-sum game,” said Seth G. Jones, an Afghanistan expert at the RAND Corporation, a policy research institute.

“Will any of what Trump said move the dial in Islamabad? Probably not,” he said.

American officials have spent years trying to persuade Pakistan to sever ties with the Taliban and the Haqqani network, one of its most dangerous factions, which Islamabad has historically seen as reliable proxies to advance Pakistani interests in Afghanistan and blunt Indian influence there. Officials said the support includes both active help with money and military equipment as well as benign neglect — allowing leaders of the groups to use western Pakistan as a base of operations for attacks into Afghanistan.

Washington has blamed this clandestine support for the deaths of American troops in Afghanistan, sending the United States’ relations with Pakistan spiraling downward. Last year, President Barack Obama took the provocative step of using an armed drone to kill the Taliban’s leader in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan.

The location of the strike against the Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, was a sign that the Obama administration had grown weary of Pakistan’s failure to move against the Taliban. The government in Islamabad had long allowed C.I.A. drone strikes to kill Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s mountainous tribal areas, but had insisted that Baluchistan and other “settled” parts of Pakistan were off limits to American military and intelligence operations.

India has also spent more than a decade quietly exerting its influence in Afghanistan — from building highways and other high-profile construction projects to providing both overt and covert support for factions in Afghanistan aligned with New Delhi’s interests. The extent of this support, and what effect it has had on the ground in Afghanistan, has long been unclear.

The India-Pakistan proxy conflict in Afghanistan has been deadly at times, as it was in 2008 when a suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul killed dozens and wounded more than 100 people. American intelligence agencies gathered information at the time that the attack was planned in part by Pakistan’s military spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, leading the Bush administration to issue a stern warning to Islamabad.

Mr. Obama also spoke publicly about welcoming Indian economic development in Afghanistan, but always insisted that it should not be seen as a threat by Islamabad. In contrast, Mr. Trump’s appeal for India’s help in Afghanistan set off alarms on Tuesday in Pakistan, where officials warned that such an approach risked jolting an already tumultuous relationship.

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that “the simultaneous entreaty to India to become more involved in Afghanistan is also likely to make it more difficult, not less, to secure Pakistan’s cooperation against groups that some consider to be acting as its proxies.”

In response to Mr. Trump’s speech, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the idea that Pakistan is a haven for militant groups a “false narrative,” and said that the United States and Pakistan need to work together to eradicate terrorism.

It called the longstanding, bloody conflict with India over the Kashmir region “the primary obstacle to peace and stability in the region.

Sehar Kamran, a senator who leads an Islamabad-based think tank, said that Mr. Trump’s plan appeared to be “more of the same, under much more colorful language and contradictory bluster.”

Ms. Kamran said that pushing India to play a stronger role in Afghanistan would isolate Washington’s friends in Islamabad “without realizing, understanding or perhaps deliberately underestimating the impact of increasing India presence on Pakistan’s western border.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, some longtime South Asia experts said that the president will still find limits to how far he can push Pakistan — especially now that Mr. Trump has committed to open-ended conflict in Afghanistan.

Barnett Rubin, a State Department official during the Obama administration and a professor at New York University, said that the Pentagon will continue to need Pakistan for military supply lines into Afghanistan.

Mr. Rubin and other analysts said that Pakistan’s dependence on the United States — particularly military aid — had declined in recent years as the country developed closer ties with China, giving policy makers in Islamabad more room to maneuver.

“Pakistan is prepared to absorb the impact of a more assertive U.S. policy toward the country,” said Arif Rafiq, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It’s the most economically stable that it’s been in a decade, thanks in part to massive Chinese investment, and it has managed to secure much of its border regions despite the withdrawal of most U.S. combat forces.”

Indeed, hours after Mr. Trump accused Pakistan of “housing the very terrorists that we are fighting,” China’s government issued a forceful defense of the country that took aim at the president’s comments.

“Pakistan is at the forefront of the counterterrorism efforts,” said a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hua Chunying. “We believe that the international community should fully recognize the efforts made by Pakistan in fighting terrorism.”

It is China’s hope, she said, “that the relevant policy of the United States can be conducive to promoting the security and stability of Afghanistan and South Asia.”

It was couched in opaque diplomatic language, but the message in the Chinese statement was clear: The United States can summon India to take on a larger role in the place where it has waged its longest war, but Pakistan can turn to a great power of its own.